Online Marketing Blog

Social Media News Release – Separating Fact From Fiction 

Of the many motivating factors for the use of social media press releases, there are two driving forces that stand out: The changing needs of the end consumer and increasing ease of use for the media.

Due to the increasingly social and sharing nature of the web and the increasing importance of press releases as direct to consumer communication tools, it is important for marketers and public relations professionals to adjust their message format and delivery to correspond with the needs of today’s web savvy audience.

It’s a day for announcing acquisitions I guess. I just read over at TechCrunch that the popular social news and bookmarking site Reddit has been acquired by the parent of Wired Magazine, Cond?© Nast.

“All four reddit employees will relocate from Boston to Wired‚Äôs San Francisco office and become part of Wired Digital.”

Congrats to Steve, Alexis, Christopher and Aaron!

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I just received an email from JotSpot, a wiki service provider we use. JotSpot was co founded by Joe Kraus, a name you might remember in search engine history as a founder of Excite.com

Here’s the email:

We’re writing to let you know that Google has acquired JotSpot. We believe this is great news for our users. More importantly, we want to reassure you that you’ll continue to have uninterrupted access to your account. Both Google and JotSpot are committed to supporting our customers, and we understand that users have invested a lot in our products. In the near-term, we’re focused on migrating JotSpot to Google’s systems and datacenters. We’ll work hard to make that move as seamless as possible so that customers won’t be inconvenienced.
Why is Google acquiring JotSpot?

As you can see from the graph above, the number of RSS and RSS to email subscribers of Online Marketing Blog has grown substantially since we moved over to WordPress and updated the design. Participating in a little social media optimization hasn’t hurt either.

One of the metrics we look at with client blogs as well as our own are the most popular RSS feed readers and aggregators used. This influences the RSS chicklets or buttons used to promote the feed.

Checking the Feedburner stats for Online Marketing Blog there are 118 different RSS readers logged. I suspect 30 or so of those are blog bots. Here’s the distribution of top ten RSS readers from most to least popular for this blog:

Via TW, Fortune reports that Yahoo may be resuming talks with AOL about an acquisition as a play against rival Google.

“FORTUNE has learned from multiple sources that Yahoo! recently approached Time Warner (parent of FORTUNE’s publisher) about buying America Online – essentially trying to jump-start talks that broke down a year ago. A source close to Yahoo disputes that Yahoo approached Time Warner and says that there are no active conversations between the two companies.”

The story also offers speculation about what Yahoo’s next moves might be:

• Sell to Microsoft
• Merge with eBay
• Stay the course

It only took 5 years, but Andy Beal has finally come over to the world of WordPress for his blog, MarketingPilgrim. Previously, Andy ran SearchEngineLowdown.com on Google’s Blogger platform, building it up to one of the top SEO blogs on the Internet. Then after going out on his own, started MarketingPilgrim.com using the same tools.

The new design sports links to Andy’s consulting services of which I now have first hand experience. My public relations agency recently engaged Andy to provide some training via webinar to our PR team on the subject of brand monitoring and reputation management. Eight of our staff were in attendance and I have to say, Andy knows his stuff. Not only is he a great consultant on SEO firm management and search marketing, but he has established himself as a subject matter expert on the topic of brand monitoring and competitive intelligence as well.

Andy Beal comes over to the dark side and launches a new blog design using WordPress.

Rae posts an excellent interview with Brian Prince of BOTW.org.

Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro does it again with a great article on search marketing reaching critical mass in a follow-up to his previous “Cross the Chasm” article.

Aaron Wall posts “Trusted vs Untrusted Links” and follows up with another “vs” post, “Tactical SEO vs Strategic SEO“, which is excellent, but has more to do with SEO for sites/blogs whose business model is ad revenue than advice most business web sites can take advantage of. Great advice all the same though.

“3 Link Bait Lessons from a Master Link Baiter” SEO Black Hat.

There’s lots of buzz about how to use RSS for business marketing of late, particularly for business to business RSS marketing, so here are some tried and true resources as well as a few recent articles:

KnowledgeStorm Research Report: “How Blogs and RSS Affect B2B Technology Purchase Decisions” also covered by DMNews.

If you work in the B2B marketing space, then you will also be interested in this upcoming webcast: “How to Use New Media to Market to IT Professionals” which is happening Nov 2nd.

Rok Hrastnik “wrote the book” on RSS Marketing who also published “The Business Case for RSS”

Charlene Li from Forrester, “Using RSS as a Marketing Tool”

White paper on RSS by Yahoo and Ipsos Insight,”RSS‚ÄîCrossing into the Mainstream” (pdf)

Recently Google added links to blog search in Google News and now Google Alerts has been updated to include blogs. The Google Alert options now include:  News, Web, Blogs, Groups or Comprehensive. Time intervals of notification are: as it happens, once a day or once a week.

Google Alerts are very useful to see who is writing about you or your cliens. It’s also use for identifying when optimized press releases or articles are getting indexed.

It’s good to see blogs getting more play in the mix of Google search functions. What’s next?

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The buzz amongst online marketers and bloggers about marketing with social media has generated a lot of interesting discussion. One of the memes I’ve been noticing is the issue of spamming social media. A particular aspect brought to my attention recently is the idea that by making it easier for users to bookmark or “vote” for content on social news and bookmarking services, perhaps by using our social bookmarks link tool, that it’s an invitation to spam.

There’s a difference between ease of submission and getting to the first page of a social news or bookmarking site, where the most benefit is. The communities of those social media sites provide a self policing effect against most types of SM spam. I agree, that making submissions easier may attract abuse, but it will be noise hanging at the bottom.

Yahoo has launched a snappy new blog today for Yahoo Search Marketing. Call me crazy, but purple is my favorite color after all and the look/feel of this blog is consistent with many of the newer and more progressive blog designs coming out.

With the launch of Yahoo’s new platform (Panama) it makes sense to offer a communication channel specific to Yahoo advertising options. I am very interested in the media side of this:

“We‚Äôll examine how 21st Century media such as Tivo, satellite radio and the Internet are contributing to the challenges faced by traditional marketing channels like TV, radio and newspapers. Audiences are fragmenting, and advertisers both large and small are looking for understanding and insight into alternate solutions that will provide the connections they need to their target markets.”

Watch out, cat post coming!

Recently a credit card of mine was identified by the issuing bank as possibly having been included in a set of stolen data or online tampering. A new card was issued. Then I went about updating services paid with this card.

One of these services was our phone company and DSL provider, Frontier Communications. After not being able to login to the online bill pay I called and was informed the only way to change the card on file was to login via online bill pay. My description of not being able to login or successfully retrieve login information was falling on deaf ears, so I restate this information. I am informed of Frontier’s excellent security measures and the rep reiterates that the only way to change the card on file is through logging in online, knowing full well that I cannot do that.