Online Marketing Blog

WebProNews has posted another great video interview, this time with Todd Malicoat and Neil Patel. In this interview, Mike McDonald of WPN discusses social media optimization and digg with Todd and Neil who presented on a SMO session at SES Chicago.

Speaking of social media, Neil and Cameron’s Pronet Advertising blog was awarded “Best Blog on Social Media Optimization” in Search Engine Journal’s recent Blog Awards. Barry does the best roundup of the blog winners over at Search Engine Land though. Note to Loren: Please take notes from Barry, it would be easier to find the good stuff on SEJ!

The KBCafe Blog Awards is still taking votes until Jan 10, so be sure to visit category #11 and vote for Online Marketing Blog, Search Engine Roundtable and/or Matt Cutts.

There’s been an interesting thread started by Steve Rubel who claims, more or less, that social media is dead. Hmm. Steve’s PR agency royally screws up not once, not twice, but at least three times when trying to use social media (flogs or paying off bloggers) on behalf of their clients. If your firm performed so poorly and was outed in such an embarrassing manner, wouldn’t you want to distance yourself from the channel as well?

I do like Daniel Riveong’s ideas about “social media agency” in contrast to “public relations agency”. Chip Griffin seems to like “online media” and Brian Solis presents a spirited counterpoint to Rubel’s “death” post that I think is worth reading.

Last, Pandia offers some fairly obvious observations “We are certain that social media marketing ‚Äî the use of Web 2.0 sites and services ‚Äî will become an important part of search as well as search engine marketing in 2007.” in an article today, “2007 The Year of Search Engines and Social Media“.