Online Marketing Blog

The second workshop of the day at Web 2.o Expo, “Startup Metrics 101: Product & Marketing Workshop” provided attendees a glimpse into the vast depth of knowledge from Dave McClure of 500 Hats who offered some pirate speak, “AARRR” to help delegates remember his model for building web businesses.

Hiten Shah of CrazyEgg and KISSmetrics provided practical examples and Vanessa Fox of Ignition Partners and Nine By Blue offered a combination of SEO centric tips, analytics and examples.

First up was the Web 2.0 Pirate, Dave McClure with his “AARRR” model:

• Acquisition – Where users come to your site from the web
• Activation – First positive experience
• Retention – Keep them coming back
• Referral – Refer others to the site

My first post from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco is the second half of “Free Traffic: SEO/SMO 101 (Search Engine & Social Media Optimization) with Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts and Muhammad Saleem of Advantage Consulting Services. Unfortunately, I missed the SEO portion and gauging by the crowd around Stephan, it went quite well.

Muhammad Saleem’s portion of the presentation focuses on Social Media Optimization and Marketing 101. I’ve not met Mahammaed in person before and he’s sporting a very cool goatee with a waxed moustache.

Saleem’s presentation focuses on 4 aspects of social media:

• Blogs
• Social News sites
• Social Networks
• Online Video

Many other tools don’t have that big of an impact/conversionrate for the “average” company.

The buzz about SEO in the public relations industry has grown tremendously over the past 2-3 years. Press releases in particular, have been the easy target for promotion as candidates for optimization. With the growing use of Google and Yahoo News, optimizing press releases have been an easy way to gain prominent visibility in the short term and in some cases, long term visibility in standard search engines.

As both a SEO and a PR practitioner for companies ranging from startups for Fortune 20 corporations, our Online Marketing Agency is tasked with educating audiences in both industries. For example, at public relations conferences, I’m the SEO guy talking about optimized PR. At search marketing conferences, I’m the PR guy talking about using PR for SEO. Our Account Managers like Jolina Pettice and Mike Yanke do the same thing with clients.

This week might as well be called “social media week” with the NewComm Forum, SMX Social Media and the Web 2.0 Expo all happening at pretty much the same time. Companies worldwide are trying their best to make sense of the emerging landscape of social technologies and the new book, Groundswell, from Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li of Forrester does a fantastic job at just that.

Photo Credit stuartliroff

Charlene Li is Vice President & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research covering social computing and technologies. She is undoubtedly one of the most often quoted analysts on all things dealing with social computing and commerce on the web. After reading a review copy of “Groundswell – Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies” I’ve been referring every chance I get. Following is an interview with Charlene about the book and her insights into key questions for companies trying to demystify the social web.

Good things come to those who wait and dammit, we’ve been waiting a good long time for some new search marketing blogs worthy of addition to the BIGLIST. You can still get updates by following the BIGLIST Twitter account as well. Enjoy!

• WebmasterRadio.FM – Our friends from WebmasterRadio.FM have joined the cool kids and started a blog. Jody from WMR posts that you can now watch the live video stream, chat with all the other WebmasterRadio.FM listeners, listen to the live audio, and interact with your favorite shows – all on the blog.

• Advanced Web Metrics – The now ex-Googler web analytics guru Brian Clifton is the author of Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics and this is his blog. Note the blogroll for analytics bloggers.

[Note from Lee: Please join me in welcoming Jessica Cameron-Ruud as a contributor to Online Marketing Blog. Jessica works as an Account Coordinator with TopRank's Online Marketing clients]

Over the past few months, MCAD and MIMA have hosted a series of events here in Minneapolis entitled ‘Conversations About The Future of Advertising’ (CATFOA). The most recent of which featured Joseph Jaffe, author of the new book “Join the Conversation”, who discussed conversational marketing as the next step for companies to connect with their customers.

A conversation is no longer defined as a sole dialog between two people, but as Jaffe explained, conversations are being held online between two or more sides including business to business, business to consumer, and even consumer to consumer. The conversation can be positive, negative or indifferent.

Thanks to the response received (@gyutae @AlbertMaruggi @AnnBernard @briansolis @martinbowling) from a Twitter post (follow here) on the topic of social marketing vs direct marketing, this post invites your opinion.

In a recent strategy session, some colleagues and I were discussing a promotion where one position was to focus on a direct marketing approach and another position involved social media, networks and communities. Compared to direct marketing efforts (snail mail, DRTV, email, etc) where an offer is created based on what the company wants to sell, a social marketing effort focuses more on involving communities with creating the offer as well as promoting it.

What would a direct marketing offer in this situation look like?

• Develop top level messaging
• Research and build an email list

This past Saturday, I visited local Twin Cities brewery, and soon to be local institution, Surly for their weekend growler sale. As per usual, my group and I were not alone in our quest as local denizens lined up to purchase as much as they could carry of the finest locally produced brew since the Hamm’s bear danced straight into our hearts.

So what is it that makes Surly, a beer that’s only been in existence on a local scale since 2006, a brand already demanded for by name and housed in a brewery that has become a Saturday destination point for many? The answer for Surly as well as other brands with an enthusiastic following can be found in Rohit Bhargava’s new book “*Personality Not Included.”

After 10 plus years in the SEM business, it’s a bit of an understatement to say that the nature of SEO is constantly changing. Those changes involve both the search engines refining the way they sort and display search results as well as consumer search behaviors. A simple example would be a year ago, searching Google would return mostly web pages in the search results. That same search today might include videos, news items, images or blog posts – now commonly known as Universal search.

In addition to web pages, each of these types of information comes from a different database. This presents opportunities for companies to gain search visibility not only with high ranking web pages, but with other digital media as well. Changes with search and ranking criteria are constantly being fine tuned and improved by the search engines.

Photo Credit, CC Chapman

At last year’s DMA07 Annual Conference, I had the good fortune of giving half of a workshop on social media with renowned author, speaker and new media marketing guru, Joseph Jaffe. Too many marketing pundits don’t “walk the talk” and I found this not to be the case with Jaffe. A brilliant marketer who dares to challenge established marketing groupthink and advocates experimentation, Jaffe brings a fresh perspective that has attracted blue chip clients like P&G, The Coca-Cola Company, American Airlines and Motorola. He has also written two excellent books: “Life After the 30 Second Spot” and “Join the Conversation“.

M&O PR‘s Kevin Sawyer and I are now finally back in the office after two jam packed days of Media Relations Summit. Public and media relations professionals, academics and business communicators from across the country gathered at what is known as the largest event for media relations in the world. Kevin blogged the event over at Media Relations blog and I made a few posts here and many more on Twitter.

Here’s a summary of the sessions we attended and covered:

The compelling morning keynote presentations were sandwiched by PR Technology updates and then followed by 4 tracks of sessions. Here are the sessions that Kevin and I blogged:

• Media Relations Summit 2008: A Preview – Kevin
• MR Summit: Charlie Rose and the Death of the VNR – Kevin

In the opening keynote at Media Relations Summit, the legendary TV journalist and interviewer, Charlie Rose, had the tables turned and became interviewee with the famous PR guru, Howard Rubenstein.

Rubenstein: Why are your interviews so revealing? How do you get your guests to reveal so much?

Rose: The thing about a story… Describes the recent news over the weekend about the Clinton campaign manager getting sacked. People that do what I do want to advance a story like that. Stories are about communicating the range of emotions that are important to people.

The world I live in is driven by relationships. It’s not who you know, but how you know them.