Online Marketing Blog

Late last week, Lee, Jolina and I attended the event, Dual Reality: Who Controls Social Media in the Enterprise, sponsored by the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA). As we sat in the front row, eagerly awaiting the discussion panel to emerge, we reviewed the roster of panelists, including Interactive Directors (titles varying from one company to the next) from Fortune 500 Companies such as Target, Best Buy, General Mills, and Fingerhut. The question in everyone’s mind was: How are corporations really leveraging social media to reach customers online?

Someone that I’ve wanted to interview as much as Robert Scoble is Guy Kawasaki. Guy is an enthusiastic promoter and marketer which are qualities Online Marketing Blog readers can appreciate a great deal. In this interview, he talks briefly about his most recent project, Alltop as well as changes he would make to Twitter, business blogging advice and a curious admission that he doesn’t understand SEO.

You have such a long and well published history working with technology and web based ventures ranging from your time at Apple to Garage Ventures to what you’re doing with Truemors and now Alltop. What are 2 or 3 things most people don’t know about you?

Lee and Rob at PRSA International 2007

On the marketing conference circuit, online reputation management is a hot topic now more then ever. Whether it’s search marketing, public relations or direct marketing, companies are trying to make sense of how to monitor and manage the brand impact of online conversations and their visibility in search results.

Last Thursday I did a national PRSA teleseminar with Kami Watson Huyse, “Reputation Management in a Google World” and tomorrow in Orlando, Florida the DMA’s ACCM conference is hosting: “Reputation Management: Protecting Your Brand in the Search Engines“, a session with myself and Rob Key of Converseon presenting. Moderater duties will be handled by Heather Lloyd Martin of SuccessWorks.

The results of our poll on how Online Marketing Blog readers use Twitter are in. We had over 220 responses, which isn’t a bad sample considering this blog is fairly niche with a modest sized (and very smart) audience. Below I’ve listed the poll results and a few comments on each. Follow us on Twitter here.

• (39%, 87 Votes) Sharing links to items of interest to your network - Not surprising since the speed of reach on Twitter is so fast. As soon as you find something interesting that’s linkable, you can drop it on Twitter and your network knows immediately. With the URL monitoring tools like the Techmeme-like Twitt(url)y and twitbuzz you can track items of interest before they ever hit the blogosphere and long before they hit mainstream media.

Tonight interactive gurus from General Mills, Best Buy, Target, Fingerhut and Gage will convene at an event hosted by MIMA to discuss: Duality Reality: Who Controls Social Media in the Enterprise?

As a preview, I reached out to Douglas Pollei (left) of Social Media Club Minneapolis and VP of Internet Strategy and Corporate Development for IKANO Communications who helped get the panel created and panelist Jim Cuene (right), who is Director of Interactive at General Mills. to ask a few questions about tonight’s topic.

Conferences are a big part of TopRank’s marketing and content promotion strategy and it looks like a busy summer is ahead of us. Numerous events are coming up quickly - enough to make your head spin. Here is a summary of our involvement with PRSA, DMA, PUSH, SIS, SES and SMX events over the next 30 days:

05/14/08 - MIMA: Duality Reality - Who Controls Social Media in the Enterprise?
The local interactive marketing association along with inspiration and motivation from Doug Pollei, there will be a very interesting panel of in-house Interactives discussing how large companies (General Mills, Best Buy, Target, Fingerhut and OptumHealth) are adopting and measuring social media programs. If you’re in the Twin Cities this week and involved with social marketing now or in the future, this is a MUST ATTEND event.

What a week! Spring is officially here in Minnesota. Don’t laugh, it snowed just 2 weeks ago. This week’s BIGLIST of SEO and SEM blogs includes a nice mix of search, social and online PR content. When I co-hosted the Daily Searchcast on Thursday it was great to have Danny Sullivan mention the BIGLIST and what a great resource it is. We hope Online Marketing Blog readers feel the same, so be sure to follow us on Twitter and spread the word!

Two heads are better than one. How many times have we all heard that in our lives?  When having a brainstorming session, it helps to bounce ideas off of one another to generate the best possible solution. Even when saving the world, is it always important to have a sidekick. Or a team of sidekicks.

The same is true of link building teams. It can be considered a general rule of thumb to say “the more, the merrier” when it comes to the size of a team working on link building, social media and content promotion. An experienced team working together will generate far more inbound links and traffic to the target website than just one person – bent over a desk, Red Bull in hand, click-clacking away on the keyword.

[Editor's note: We're excited to share this next guest post from David Alston of Radian6. A fast emerging leader in the field of social media measurement, Radian6 (a TopRank client) provides social media monitoring tools to hundreds of leading PR firms, ad agencies and brand marketers.]

David is VP Marketing at Radian6 in New Brunswick, Canada with previous experience at several tech startups in the interactive advertising and the video over IP space. Most recently, he was partner and VP of Marketing at PR firm, Revolution Strategy. His blog is TweetPR.

Yesterday, Junta 42 announced their latest list of top content marketing focused blogs (Online Marketing Blog came in at #2 in between Copyblogger and PR 2.0) and it reminded me yet again of how important content is for SEO. It used to be when discussing search engine optimization services 5-6 years ago, we’d focus on keyword optimization of content and getting links as independent tactics. Today, it’s a different story.

Of course many of the basics of SEO still apply, such as keyword research, on-page optimization of existing content and solving crawling issues. But attracting links and creating new content are no longer separate tasks. They’re interdependent.

“For the first time in the history of calculating the ROI of marketing expenditures, influence behaviors and patterns of the volume achievable only on the social web begin to offset the overall cost of marketing,” quotes the new book “The Open Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World” by Resource Interactive’s President Kelly Mooney and Innovation Consultant Dr. Nita Rollins.

While not appearing on page one, this idea is certainly one of the most important, and likely most sought after skim through takeaways marketers (both on the client and agency side) will seek when first hunting for the knowledge contained within this book.

Right along with Facebook, YouTube and blogging, Twitter is one of the most often written about social media communication tools. (Follow me @leeodden) We’ve run polls about how people use Twitter as well as aggregated tips from the Twitter community on how to get the most productivity out of it. This post shares a few new Twitter tools you may find useful.

TweetWheel - You may have a 100 or even 1000 followers. Which of your followers know each other? Tweet Wheel helps you find out visually. Note, if you have a LOT of followers, this will take a while.